Installing Dragonfly 1.8 hangs BIOS completly

[Michael Neumann]

Rauf Kuliyev wrote:
Hi,

I bet it is IBM ThinkPad. You can find additional information here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/install.html#BOOT-ON-THINKPAD 
No it isn't a ThinkPad, it's a Bullman (noname), similar to an Acer.

FreeBSD runs without change to the bootblock.
NetBSD 3.1 runs as well, but during install I have to specify the disk 
geometry.

This night I installed DragonFly 1.4.0-RELEASE (via dfly.iso) on it, and 
it works perfectly!

Strange is that NetBSD seems to use a different disk geometry than 
DragonFly 1.4, and DragonFly 1.8 uses a different one as well!

> uname
DragonFly 1.4.0-RELEASE
> fdisk
in-core disklabel geometry
cylinders=20672 heads=45 sectors/track=63
  (2835 blks/cyl)
BIOS geometry: same as above

sysid 165
  start 63, size 58605057 (28615 MB)
  beg: cyl 0 head 1 sector 1
  end: cyl 191 head 44 sector 63
Strange, when I boot the DragonFly 1.8.0-RELEASE installer (after 
installation of 1.4 or modifying the harddisk) I get:

> uname
DragonFly 1.8.0-RELEASE
> fdisk
cylinders=58140 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
I don't know about the issues involved with different disk geometries, 
but as this is the only difference I see between DragonFly 1.4 and 1.8, 
maybe this might be a problem?

Regards,

  Michael

Regards,
Rauf
On 2/19/07, Michael Neumann <mneumann at ntecs.de> wrote:
Hi,

Just a few minutes ago, I installed Dragonfly 1.8 onto my laptop.
Then I rebooted, and the BIOS hung up completely after showing that it
detected the harddisk and cdrom. I powered down and tried again, but
that didn't worked either. I couldn't even boot a CD or anything else or
couldn't even enter the BIOS setup.
The only thing that worked was to remove the harddisk physically and
then pluging it in a few seconds after the BIOS crossed the detection of
the devices. Using this method, I booted the Dragonfly installer cd and
used the disk tools to wipe out the beginning of the harddisk. Then I
rebooted again and voila, I could boot normally (without removing the
harddisk). Puh!
Now I tried a second time to install Dragonfly 1.8, but after I reboot
the BIOS hangs again!
I know that the BIOS should not hang up itself, but on the other hand
that didn't happen with any other operating system I installed on my
laptop (FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly 1.6). So I think there is something
wrong in the 1.8 version. Any hints?
Regards,

   Michael